In recent years, malt-based beverages, and especially beers, are a fast growing market in many countries such as China and India. In many of these countries, the taste and beer-type preferences are culturally different from markets such as North and South America and Europe. Most breweries operating world-wide, however, provide a limited number of beer types, and hence, beer tastes. Due to globalization, the availability of specialized beer types that meet specific consumer demands becomes a challenge, both in terms of logistics and in terms of the amount of different beer types and tastes to be developed and produced.
Beer taste is dependent on the ingredients used (e.g., malt-type, adjunct levels, hops type and levels, other ingredients such as fruit flavors, water composition, etc.) and operational settings (e.g., boiling time, yeast type used for fermentation, fermentation temperature profile, filtration, etc.).
Brewing finished beer, wherein all the ingredients are introduced into the beer prior to bottling, has a major drawback in that the formulation and thus the taste, smell, color and other organoleptic properties of the beer are fixed.
A partial solution to this drawback has been provided with for example in U.S. Pat. No. 7,008,652, which discloses a method of manufacturing a colorless, flavorless and odorless fermented malt-based stock for subsequent flavoring having a total solids content of less than 1%.
The method disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 7,008,652, however, provides a fermented malt-based stock composition that is substantially free of beer-characteristic. Accordingly, flavoring of such malt-based stock is perceived to be limited due to the large amount of flavors to be added. Additionally, it appears that a natural tasting beer would be difficult to achieve utilizing such malt-based stock.
Another drawback of the method according to U.S. Pat. No. 7,008,652 is that the addition of flavors, especially due to the large amount, remains difficult and specialists work, making it difficult for end-consumers to personalize the malt-base according to their own desire.
In view of the foregoing, there remains a need for individualized malt-based beverages meeting a personal organoleptic profile. Additionally, there is a need for systems, methods, and devices that facilitate a relatively easy preparation of such malt-based beverages by consumers. Furthermore, there is a need for systems, methods, and devices that provide consumers with the experience of preparing a truly natural malt-based beverage.